The Book of Night Women

People think blood red, but blood don’t got no colour.

People who say that we live in a post-racial society are talking bullshit. People who say that (Western) society can only become race-issue free when we forget everything that happened in the past, need to make an obligatory reading of this. This is a past that should never be forgotten. How we live with it should be the discussion, not how we should ignore/shove it away.

Onwards. The Book Of Night Women tells the story of Lilith, through her eyes. Her mother was a teen slave that got raped by her master. Lilith works in the house of a plant on Jamaica. She’s treated differently by the other slaves because she’s a house slave over the field slaves, but more importantly: she has “white” eyes. Lilith is a half breed, too dark for the white people, too white for the other slaves.

The slaves are considered as something less than animals, somewhere between a faulty piece of equipment and a moral-less, emotionless creation. If you whip, kick or burn one to death, you buy another one. You take their children, because they can’t raise them themselves properly. And there’s no end to it.

All this lies heavy on the heart, but never gets so depressing that it puts you off reading on. The surroundings Marlon James shows could star in a travel guide, the characters are extraordinary without making the mistake of making them the Exotic Ones.